Things are getting exciting! Five games into the 2024-2025 Premier League season and what a spectacle it has been so far.

All teams have managed to get on the board with at least one point. When looking at the lower half of the table, six teams are all yet to register a win:

• Leicester City (3D, 2L)
• Crystal Palace (3D, 2L)
• Ipswich Town (3D, 2L)
• Southampton (1D, 4L)
• Everton (1D, 4L)
• Wolves (1D, 4L)

The latter three of those teams listed are all equal on one-point and currently sitting in the relegation zone.

At the top of the league, Manchester City are one-point clear of Liverpool and Aston Villa, with 13-points from a possible 15. There are still four teams that remain unbeaten so far and those are:

• Manchester City (4W, 1D)
• Arsenal (3W, 2D)
• Brighton (2W, 3D)
• Nottingham Forest (2W, 3D)

The three promoted teams from the EFL Championship in the 23-24 season are currently sitting in 15th (Leicester City), 17th (Ipswich Town), and 18th (Southampton), with what looks to be a tough battle ahead to remain in the Premier League.

Matchday 6 takes place starting this weekend with 7 games on Saturday September 28, 2 games on Sunday September 29, and one game on Monday September 30th.

In this week’s post, we’re focusing on the different types of shot and goal creation scenarios that teams, and individual players, have encountered so far this season.

Squad Shot Creation

For starters, we define a shot creation action (SCA) as:

Shot Creation Action – the two offensive actions that directly lead to a shot. For example, this could be a pass, take-on, or even a previous shot.

Likely unsurprisingly, Manchester City have the most shot creation actions so far this season with 185. They average 37 SCA per game played (keep in mind, this is the two offensive actions that directly lead to a shot).

At the other end of the SCA table is Ipswich Town who average 12.6 SCA per game, for a total of 63 created so far. City have nearly tripled Town’s SCA.

Shot creation actions can be classified as a number of different types (as per FBREF dat):

• Live Pass – completed live-ball pass that leads to a shot attempt
• Dead Pass – completed dead-ball pass that leads to a shot attempt (e.g., corner kick, free kick, throw-in, goal kick)
• Take On – a take-on, that is successful, that leads to a shot attempt
• Shot – a shot that leads to another shot attempt
• Foul Drawn – a foul drawn that leads to a shot attempt
• Defensive Action – a defensive action that leads to a shot attempt (e.g., tackles, challenges, blocks, interceptions

As expected, when looking at the total number of SCA’s (2,349) for all Premier League teams, 74% of them are from live passes (1,740), while only 2% of them are from defensive actions (39).

When diving in a bit deeper to each of the SCA types, it is interesting to see how the proportions change for different teams, depending on their style of play.

Live Ball Passes

Manchester City have the highest number of live pass shot creation actions with 153, representing 83% of all their SCA. However, Manchester United’s live pass SCA (112) represent 88% of their total SCA (127).

Said differently, the number of shot creation actions created by Manchester Untied that aren’t as a result of live ball passes are minimal. For instance, Manchester United have only created 9 SCAs that are from dead ball passes, equaling 7% of all their SCAs.

The threat Manchester United present to opponents from other types of SCA (e.g., free kicks and corners from dead ball passes) is almost not worth mentioning when looking at the graph above.

Keeping in mind that this is not singling out Manchester United, as most teams have a significant proportion of shot creation actions from their live passes. However, Manchester United have the highest percentage of SCA from those live passes, underscoring the lack of SCA created from areas.

Dead Ball Passes

When looking at the proportion of all shot creation actions, 21% is as a result of dead ball passes from Ipswich Town. As seen below, Ipswich have shot creation actions resulting from a range of different tactical plays. They aren’t as reliant on live ball passes as Manchester United is.

The highest proportion of SCA from dead ball passes is 21% by Ipswich, with Leicester City coming in second with 15%.

It makes sense that these teams, who are sitting lower in the table, have higher proportions than other teams. Strictly because they often don’t have as much possession and ball control than higher placed teams. As a result, they rely heavily on dead ball passes (corners, throw-ins, free kicks, etc.) to create shots, instead of just live play.

Shot Creation (Top Half vs. Bottom Half Teams)

When looking at the total shot creation actions of teams ranked 1 through 10 vs. teams ranked 11 through 20, some interesting insights emerge.

Expectedly, teams ranked 1 through 10 have more shot creation actions in the 5 games so far in this 2024-2025 English Premier League season.

In total, these top 10 teams have 1,297 shot creation actions, for an average of 129.7/team.

Alternatively, the bottom 10 teams have registered 1,052 shot creation actions, for an average of 105.2/team.

However, there are some outliers.

Arsenal, who at the time of writing this post, is ranked fourth in the league but has the the fifth lowest shot creation actions, with 92.

Bournemouth, who is currently ranked thirteenth in the league, has 151 shot creation actions, which is the 3rd highest in the league.

It goes to show that while some teams have more shot creation actions, they aren’t clinical enough to convert them to goals, resulting in wins, resulting in a higher ranking in the league table.

Similarly, there are teams that have a lower number of shot creation actions than their league ranking would predict, but instead, they are more efficient at converting their chances.

Individual Contributions to Shot Creation Actions

The blog post so far has focused on team shot creation actions. However, there are a number of players who individually boost their teams shot creation activity as a result of their ability or style of play.

Below are the 10 players with the highest shot creation actions after match day five of the 2024-2025 Premier League season.

• Andreas Pereira – 31
• Mohamed Salah – 31
• Son Heung-min – 30
• James Maddison – 29
• Kevin De Bruyne – 28
• Marcus Tavernier – 28
• Dwight McNeil – 27
• Eberechi Eze – 26
• Dejan Kulusevski – 25
• Luis Diaz – 23 (along with Alex Iwobi and Cole Palmer)

Note that there are 3 Tottenham players in the top 10.

All of the players in the top 10 have significant contributions in the form of live passes (Son has the highest in the league with 24). However, some outliers include Andreas Pereira and Dwight McNeil with notable dead pass contributions to shot creation actions, with 16 and 11 respectively.

Similarly, Salah and Diaz both have 6 take-ons that resulted in a shot creation action, which have them tied for the highest in the league.

Summary

In this post, we focused on shot creation actions. As a reminder, a shot creation action is defined as the two offensive actions that directly lead to a shot. The greater the number of shot creation actions, the larger number of shots a team creates, resulting in a greater probability of scoring.

The key type of shot creation actions are from live passes. However, there are a number of other types outlined in the this post, with the second most important being dead-ball passes (corners, throw-ins, free kicks, etc.).

We outlined the number and type of shot creation actions that teams have based on their ranking in the top half vs. bottom half of the Premier League table.

Lastly, we focused on some of the individual players who integral parts of their teams in order to generate shot creation actions.

That’s it for this post! Stay tuned for future posts and send us a message if there is a specific topic you would like to see covered.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read these posts!

JC